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Premises Of Post-Objectivism

AYN RAND AND THE PERVERSION OF LIBERTARIANISM

whether socialists (all those who believed in the individual's
right to possess what he or she produced) should engage in the
political process, seize control of the state, and use the state
apparatus to achieve liberation;

or, whether a worker's state was inherently contradictory,
counter revolutionary, and would only lead to the creation of a
new ruling class whose interests would still clash with those of
the ruled - that the state should be abolished allowing for no
transitional stage of any kind during which power may have the
chance to reconsolidate itself.

The situation has recreated itself with amazing similarity almost
exactly a century later. Non-libertarian parties the world over
(those who see authoritarian centralization as the bulwark of
civilization) are bankrupt, economically and intellectually. The
only viable intellectual current today falls under that ambiguous
term - "libertarian."

Today there exist beneath this umbrella as many splinter groups as
there were a hundred years ago under the umbrella of socialism.
Two distinct trends, a right and a left if you will, are clearly
discernible. One group, clearly the largest with a hierarchical
organization modeled on the other political parties, believes,
like most Marxists, in constitutional parliamentary republican
democracy. They believe that the state is a necessary guarantor
of individual safety and the product of the individual's labor,
and in gradual progress toward a free society through
participation in the political process. The other group, much
smaller and far more splintered, rejects the state as necessarily
a tool of class domination and exploitation. This group believes
that what Bakunin said a hundred years ago is as true today, "If
you took the most ardent revolutionary, vested him in absolute
power, within a year he would be worse than the Czar himself."

The first group is in all fairness a direct inheritor of the
ideals of the American Revolution. In modern times, however, it
has only two roots: (1) the Austrian school of economics
represented by Ludwig Von Mises; (2) the philosophy of Ayn
Rand. Von Mises never considered the libertarians. He answered the
Marxists and the Keynesians and defended laissez-faire capitalism
at a time when no one else would. His justification for capitalism
was empirical - the greatest good for the greatest number. Ayn
Rand, however, attempted to offer a moral justification of
capitalism by substituting the word `capitalism' for the
libertarian meaning of the word "socialism." She then attributed
all of the ills of capitalism to government interference with the
market and all of the world's wealth to the minds of the men whom
the world considered the robber barons.

The contrast between Ayn Rand's "Objectivism" and libertarianism
is deeper than mere substitution of terminology, however. Several
of her propositions or axioms place her clearly outside of the
libertarian tradition. Her justification of the state is derived
from a Hobbesian state of nature theory:

... a society without an organized government would be at
the mercy of the first criminal who came along and who would
precipitate it into chaos and gang warfare.... [The Virtue
of Selfishness, 152; pb 112]

If a society provided no organized protection against force,
it would compel every citizen to go about armed, to turn his
home into a fortress, to shoot any strangers approaching his
door - or to join a protective gang of citizens who would
fight other gangs, formed for the same purpose, and thus
bring about the degeneration of society into the chaos of
gang rule, i.e., rule by brute force, into perpetual warfare
of prehistoric savages. [Ibid., 146; pb 108]

Ayn Rand's belief in the inherent depravity of human nature which
renders us forever incapable of living without rulers and not
descending to the level of `savages', clearly places her outside
of the libertarian tradition which views human nature as
essentially good, capable of indefinite improvement through the
experience of freedom and the exercise of reason. Her knowledge of
anthropology is as embarrassing as her understanding of history.
For example, in regards to her conception of who are the savages,
she describes America as, "...a superlative material achievement
in the midst of an untouched wilderness, against the resistance of
savage tribes." [For The New Intellectual, 58; pb
50]

To Rand, the essential characteristic of the state is that it
possesses a monopoly on the use of retaliatory force. How does she
justify this monopoly or national sovereignty? She accepts it as a
given, something not requiring a justification, and demands that
an-archy, the negation of the proposition, justify itself. Her
concept of national sovereignty is then something transcendental,
existing separate and apart from individuals, and beyond the right
of the individual to accept or reject according to his or her own
reason. These propositions clearly place Ayn Rand's philosophy
closer to Hobbes, Hegel, and Marx, than to libertarianism.

The terms of "free agreements" under law are titled in favor of
lenders over debtors, landlords over tenants, employers over
employees, in a way which would not exist in a "free market." This
leveraging of power is not `objective' at all. Depending purely on
legal convention, creditors may have debtors imprisoned, tenants
may be evicted without notice and their effects confiscated, one
human being may own another or the land on which another lives and
works, all to varying degrees.

To understand Ayn Rand's psychology it is helpful to know her
background. She was born to a wealthy St. Petersburg family in
1905. The position of her family in Czarist society must have
been considerable. At a time when the lives of most Russians had
changed little since feudalism, her family was wealthy enough to
afford a French Governess and take regular vacations to the
Crimea.

It should be noted that wealth in Czarist society was almost
wholly a measure of one's favor with the government. There were
few if any Horatio Alger stories about individuals who lifted
themselves out of serfdom without the patronage of the Czar.

At the age of twelve, she must have been very upset when those
nasty workers took over her father's business. Her family fled St.
Petersburg for the Crimea and the protection of the White
Army. This experience rendered her forever incapable of seeing
land reform or any struggle of oppressed and exploited people as
anything more than hatred for the good and lust for the
unearned.

She shared with Marx the bourgeois ideology that only a few people
were capable of running things. The masses ought to be happy to
have a job working for bosses. Any suggestion that an enterprise
could be run by the employees without having someone in charge was
to her absurd.

She shared with Godwin and Kropotkin the belief that the
individual is born tabula rasa - a blank slate, and all human
knowledge is derived from sense experience. She then proceeded,
however, to completely dismiss environment and socialization as
the determining factor in the development of character.

People were to her good or evil, brilliant or indolent, depending
solely on their volition. People should be judged by their actions
with equal severity regardless of their condition. Though she
insisted that the United States was not and never had been a
completely free country, she granted no such thing as extenuating
circumstances when judging an individual and had no qualms
upholding the power of the state to inflict capital punishment.

A far more sinister legacy of Ayn Rand to libertarianism is that
of a moralizing autocrat who gathered about her an inner circle
which she ironically called, "The collective." Outwardly, this
collective professed egoism and individuality. They were to be the
vanguard of an intellectual renaissance. The price of admission to
this group, however, was slavish conformity of one's life and
professed philosophy to Ayn Rand's whims and eccentricities. For
example, she did not like men who wore facial hair or listened to
Mozart, and if you didn't give them up you were unfit for Rand's
inner circle. This is particularly sinister if one considers that
Karl Marx, believed by millions to be the very symbol of
liberation, was also an autocrat who, though professed to be the
ultimate champion of democracy, resorted to extraordinary means to
maintain control of the International Workingmen's Association. He
even moved its headquarters to New York to exclude the libertarian
influence.

Today Ayn Rand is gone, but like Marx a century ago, hers is the
primary influence on the largest libertarian organization
existing. Even the pledge which all Libertarian Party members
must sign is taken directly from her admonition, "I hereby certify
that I do not believe in or advocate the initiation of force as a
means of achieving political or social goals." In spite of their
pledge to non-violence, many libertarians are frustrated with
election laws and media censorship. An argument which circulates
among libertarians of the right is that, if they were more
threatening, the government may take steps to accommodate them as
it did the black civil rights movement.

Ayn Rand's writings are not entirely consistent on the point of
non-violence either. In The Fountainhead, Howard Roark resorts to
the use of dynamite. In Atlas Shrugged, Ragnar Danneskjold engages
in piracy on the high seas and even shells a factory which has
been nationalized. In a clandestine rescue mission, Dagny Taggart
shoots a guard who stood in the way of her desired end.

In the event of economic upheaval, ruined by unemployment and
inflation, tenants and home owners may refuse to make rent and
mortgage payments. The unemployed may seize vacant land and begin
to farm, and factory workers may realize they can run things
without stock holders. It would not be at all surprising if there
were to emerge within the libertarian right, groups committed to
direct action and counter revolutionary violence, even a coup
d'etat.

Imagine a charismatic and autocratic personality at the center of
such a group and you have the Objectivist Lenin. Like the Marxists
and right libertarians, Lenin and the Objectivists are professed
republican democrats. Lenin and the Bolsheviks promised that if
given power, they would immediately convoke a constituent
assembly. When they realized, however, they would not hold a
majority in such an assembly they turned against the idea of such
an assembly.

Can anyone doubt that the cultist mentality which characterizes
most of Miss Rand's followers could lead to the creation of a
group of self-appointed avengers of the capitalist class? That
they would suppress strikes, demonstrations, and factory take
overs? That they would not execute people for crimes against the
libertarian state?

Ayn Rand believed in a republican form of government with a
cleverly constructed constitution which would deny the majority of
the power to infringe on the rights of a minority as she conceived
them. If the majority supported a general strike against rents and
mortgages and supported the factory takeovers, would not the
clandestinely organized Objectivist libertarian party be tempted
to dispense with democracy in order to enforce what they conceived
of as the rights of the dispossessed bourgeoisie?

In all fairness it must be admitted that Ayn Rand herself would
never sanction such actions, but the same argument is made
everyday by western Marxists that Marx would probably not have
sanctioned many of Lenin's actions and would certainly not take
credit for the Soviet Union.

Lenin and the Bolsheviks won power by promising, "Land to the
peasants!" "Factories to the workers!" When they took power,
however, they immediately set about liquidating the factory
committees and nationalizing the land. They crushed work place
democracy by installing armed guards in the factories, and even
returned former owners to their positions as employees of the
worker's state. Leon Trotsky stopped the practice of soldiers
electing their officers from their ranks and even restored former
Czarist officers to their ranks in the Red Army.

When the Russian Revolution began few people clearly understood
the gulf which separated the state socialists from the
libertarians. Many dedicated libertarians like Alexander Berkman,
rallied to the Bolshevik cause, willing to give them the benefit
of the doubt in hopes that seizing state power would only be a
transitional stage toward the development of the
stateless/classless society.

Many sincere lovers of liberty now flock to the standard of the
Libertarian Party, as they did the Bolsheviks, completely ignorant
of the history of the last century. As Santayana said: "Those who
forget the mistakes of the past are doomed to repeat them."

What should be done? It should be obvious that government
enforcement of private contracts is not libertarian any more than
is taking state power to set people free. Libertarianism is and
always will mean socialism
- the self-emancipation of working people.

Libertarians must stop courting the Republican right and return to
their intellectual roots. By standing outside of the political
process we deny the state legitimacy, and like the state torturers
in Atlas Shrugged, they will come and beg for libertarians to take
over.

Remembering the
experience of the Spanish libertarians, and heeding the advice
of John Galt, libertarians must refuse state power even when
begged. The state can never be a tool of liberation. Only its
complete and utter collapse will allow for the emergence of
non-statist institutions, libertarian co-ops, communes, and free
markets, to flourish and displace the political state once and for
all.

The address of this document:
http://www.ifi.uio.no/~thomas/po/perversion-of-libertarianism.html